Technical Committee Report 27/04/00

The Technical Committee has taken a low profile from early this year. This is largely due to there not being any issues that are on the table for current consideration and that it has been difficult for the Chair of this committee to arrange a meeting with the Chair of the Council regarding current directions and issues left over from last year.

Some of our members are tied up in the SRS working group which has its own report.

WHOIS

This came up again last week where Cr John Hine brought to the attention of the Council that there was some serious concern that a WHOIS sever, as defined by ISOCNZ Policy would not be in place with the release of the new DNS System on 5th May.

Domainz has approached the technical committee for some clarification on this policy, which was largely to do with the format of the output. This we understand has been answered to the satisfaction of Domainz.

The Technical Committee also have some comment to make regarding the disclaimer that the WHOIS server produces on receipt of any query. The results seems rather long winded and to contain some misleading information regarding copyright and accuracy of the .nz database.

Zone Transfer Policy

The Chair of Domainz has approached the chair of this committee to ask for clarification of the part of the policy which states "No reasonable request will be refused".

The formal request is still to come through but may need to be clarified to make it easier for Domainz to implement this policy.

New DNS System

There are several issues that were raised during 1999 that have not been fully dealt with to date.

The Technical Committee were asked for comment on the New DNS project after it had been let to Glazier systems. The outcome was that the Technical Committee asked for a review of the design by a third party contract. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu were duly appointed and issued a report raising several areas of concern to be addressed.

There was to be another report before the system went live which we have not as yet received a copy of. We believe the Technical Committee should make comment on and report back to the council and should have been done before the system went live to satisfy ourselves that there were no further concerns.

We therefore request the Executive Director to request for the report on behalf of the council.

Scope of the Technical Committee

The technical committee was originally set up with the intent of being the technical adviser to Domainz on any technical issues to do with the business. This has not happened over the last 18 months which is of some concern, especially regarding the negative comment that the Council is now receiving from our members and the Technical members of the Internet Community.

This is currently of some considerable concern.

John Vorstermans
Chair Technical Committee.

© 2000 The Internet Society of New Zealand
Last updated 1 May 2000